Jakob Nielsen named the designers new role this year — the Forward Deployed Designer, embedded where AI is recomposing enterprise work — but the more interesting claim hides in his toolkit: contextual inquiry, task analysis, service blueprinting, ethnographic observation, all of it predates the technology it's now aimed at. The methods are design's established canon; what changed is the terrain they're deployed on.

Work is being recomposed around agents — which tasks survive, where humans move to judgment, which rituals were only ever fossils of yesterday's constraints — and the discipline is migrating with it, from the interface to the system itself. The open question is which methods transfer as-is, which need rebuilding, and which quietly stop working. This roundtable is a field comparison for design leaders doing that migration now. Bring one tool or method you've used or already adapted for AI and share your learnings.